Bulk redirect as partial

support
1

Hello!

I’m in the process of adding redirect aliases to about 40 of my posts, and I’m curious if this can be done programmatically instead. All of the posts follow this format:
old URL: /blog/posts/this-post-url/
new URL: /blog/this-post-url/

My first thought was to use a partial, but since that references the front-matter, I don’t believe it will be able to help generate front-matter (or act in lieu of it). Of course, I’m happy to be proven wrong.

I didn’t see another way of creating redirects aside from aliases in the docs or a similar post to this question – but if those things exist, please let me know! Thanks for reading!

2

Bulk redirects can ben operated by your host. If you’re using Netlify you can generate the _redirects file they use through Hugo (and custom output formats) and therefor make it as dynamic as you like. We built a module that do just that:

3

You could also add the aliases with a quick-n-dirty script. See below.

Warning

Make sure your site is backed up, or initialized as a git repo before running this.

How it Works

  • Recursively walk the content dir and find files ending in .md
  • For each file, build the desired alias, and replace the 2nd occurrence of --- with the new aliases frontmatter

Sample Output

$ node task_add_aliases_to_frontmatter.js 
Editing file: content/blog/this-post-url/index.md
Adding alias: /blog/posts/this-post-url/
Editing file: content/blog/this-post-url-2.md
Adding alias: /blog/posts/this-post-url-2/

The Script

const fs = require('fs');
const path = require('path');

const DIR = 'content';
let MATCH_COUNTER = 0;

const walk = (dir) => {
  try {
    let results = [];
    const list = fs.readdirSync(dir);
    list.forEach((file) => {
      file = path.join(dir, file);
      const stat = fs.statSync(file);
      if (stat && stat.isDirectory()) {
        // Recurse into subdir
        results = [...results, ...walk(file)];
      } else {
        // Is a file
        results.push(file);
      }
    });
    return results;
  } catch (error) {
    console.error(`Error when walking dir ${dir}`, error);
  }
};

const edit = (filePath) => {
  console.log(`Editing file: ${filePath}`);

  const oldContent = fs.readFileSync(filePath, {encoding: 'utf8'});
  const regex = /---/g;

  const split = filePath.split('/');
  let filename = null;

  if (split[split.length - 1] === 'index.md') {
    filename = split[split.length - 2];
  } else {
    filename = split[split.length - 1].replace(/.md$/, '');
  }

  const alias = `/blog/posts/${filename}/`;
  console.log(`Adding alias: ${alias}`);

  const replaceVal = `\
aliases:
  - ${alias}
---`;

  const replacer = (match) => {
    MATCH_COUNTER++;
    if (MATCH_COUNTER === 2) {
      return replaceVal;
    }
    return match;
  };

  const newContent = oldContent.replace(regex, replacer);
  fs.writeFileSync(filePath, newContent, {encoding: 'utf-8'});

  MATCH_COUNTER = 0;
};

const main = () => {
  const filePaths = walk(DIR).filter((filePath) => filePath.endsWith('.md'));
  filePaths.forEach((filePath) => edit(filePath));
};

main();
2 Likes
4

Yes, I knew this was possible – I don’t know why I didn’t really consider it as an option. But your response prompted me to try it! I use firebase hosting, so to implement this all I did was add this to my firebase.json file:

{
    "hosting": {
       ...
        "redirects": [
            {
                "source": "/blog/posts/:slug",
                "destination": "/blog/:slug",
                "type": 301
      }
    ]
    }
...
}

It worked like a charm.

Here are the relevant links I used (in case someone comes across this post):

https://firebase.google.com/docs/hosting/full-config#redirects

5

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